The river and lake steamboats of the United States are on the average distinctly better than any I am acquainted with elsewhere.  The much-vaunted splendours of such Scottish boats as the “Iona” and “Columba” sink into insignificance when compared with the wonderful vessels of the line plying from New York to Fall River.  These steamers deserve the name of floating hotel or palace much more than even the finest ocean-liner, because to their sumptuous appointments they add the fact that they are, except under very occasional circumstances, floating palaces and not reeling or tossing ones.  The only hotel to which I can honestly compare the “Campania” is the one at San Francisco in which I experienced my first earthquake.  But even the veriest landsman of them all can enjoy the passage of Long Island Sound in one of these stately and stable vessels, whether sitting indoors listening to the excellent band in one of the spacious drawing-rooms in which there is absolutely no rude reminder of the sea, or on deck on a cool summer night watching the lights of New York gradually vanish in the black wake, or the moon riding triumphantly as queen of the heavenly host, and the innumerable twinkling beacons that safeguard our course.  And when he retires to his cabin, pleasantly wearied by the glamour of the night and soothed by the supple stability of his floating home, he will find his bed and his bedroom twice as large as he enjoyed on the Atlantic, and may let the breeze enter, undeterred by fear of intruding wave or breach of regulation.  If he takes a meal on board he will find the viands as well cooked and as dexterously served as in a fashionable restaurant on shore; he may have, should he desire it, all the elbow-room of a separate table, and nothing will suggest to him the confined limits of the cook’s galley or the rough-and-ready ways of marine cookery.

Little inferior to the Fall River boats are those which ascend the Hudson from New York to Albany, one of the finest river voyages in the world; and worthy to be compared with these are the Lake Superior steamers of the Canadian Pacific Railway.  Among the special advantages of these last are the device by which meals are served in the fresh atmosphere of what is practically the upper deck, the excellent service of the neat lads who officiate as waiters and are said to be often college students turning an honest summer penny, and the frequent presence in the bill of fare of the Coregonus clupeiformis, or Lake Superior whitefish, one of the most toothsome morsels of the deep.  Most of the other steamboat lines by which I travelled in the United States and Canada seemed to me as good as could be expected under the circumstances.  There is, however, certainly room for improvement in some of the boats which ply on the St. Lawrence, and the Alaska service will probably grow steadily better with the growing rush of tourists.